Bonang barung. Sackbut. Theorbo. Gaohu and erhu. Pipa. The Stearns Collection at the University of Michigan has some twenty-five hundred musical instruments from around the globe and from as far back in time as scholars can trace them. The collection used to be housed in Hill Auditorium, where it was open for viewing during intermissions in concerts offered at Hill.
I’ve been looking at the instruments then, since I was a kid. Some items in the collection were clearly relatives of familiar instruments, and some seemed quite fantastic. On a tour once, in elementary school, I was offered the opportunity to play a clarinet of some sort, but neither I nor the docent had a reed with us. Even so, it was thrilling to be asked.
In any case, my experience of the instruments was strictly visual until Wednesday night, when the music school offered a Stearns Collection concert that the program described as an “international and intertemporal musicscape.” It was that. It was also quite the production logistically, offered in one of the music school’s rehearsal halls, rather than an auditorium, to accommodate the movement of ensembles and instruments through the space.
My big hope was to hear a performance by a gamelan ensemble, having learned about such groups and from lectures by Bill Malm, former director of the Stearns Collection. The gamelan comes from Indonesia and includes various tuned percussion instruments, from hanging gongs to ranks of what look like brass pots that sit on a frame of taut strings. The effect is beautiful, very structured, and distinctly nonwestern.
Someone recently donated a much less sublime instrument to the collection, an Encore Automatic Banjo, salvaged from a New Jersey bar. A roll like a player piano roll, plays a banjo fixed in a cabinet. Joe Gascho, director of the Stearns, told the audience that the instrument used to have a slot of nickels, but that when the collection restored it, they converted it to Apple Pay. Then he aimed his phone at the instrument, and his confederate switched it on. Although Encore still produces automatic banjos—retail price, $29,000—this old one sounded like a novelty.
In the same vein, there was a demonstration of an Edison Wax Cylinder Player, one of those early phonographs with an enormous trumpet-shaped horn. This was presented in the context of music for silent movies, but what was most striking was the superiority of electronic amplification of sound over the mechanical amplification of that horn. On the other hand, you could hear the tapping feet of dancers doing the Black Bottom, either way you listened.
The Chinese Orchestra of the U-M Residential College played two pieces, using a host of exotic instruments. The pieces were haunting, wistful. And the members of the orchestra expressed gratitude that they could be together and play the music of their culture in a place so far from home.
All the musicians in the concert were delighted with their instruments, both talking a bit about them and playing them. Usually, instruments are treated as a means to an end, but there was passion for them on Wednesday night. Because of this eagerness to show off the instruments, the concert was a long one. Director Gascho acknowledged this, saying, “Believe it or not, we actually cut a lot of things.”
Happily, they did not cut the finale: “Improvisation #1 for Xylopong and Electronics.” What, one might inquire, is a xylopong? It’s an instrument Gascho has wanted to make for years and rounded up the help to make quite recently, the xylopong having been completed in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It’s a ping-pong table, to the surface of which a multitude of wooden rods have been attached, with various areas of the rods tuned differently.
One plays the xylopong by rolling a ping-pong ball along the rods. Or bouncing balls on them. Or, for that matter, playing ping-pong on them. Musicians took mallets to them as well, striking the rods or running the mallet heads along them. They played other Stearns instruments in combination with the xylopong. Not only did the new instrument create wonderful sounds, but it was visually fascinating, especially when ten or twelve ping-pong balls were cascading down on it from great heights, in a sort of ping-pong-ball fountain of hollow pops.
The xylopong, at three days old, must be the youngest instrument ever added to the Stearns Collection. My husband and I were delighted to be there for its debut performance. We were also pleased to hear instruments unfamiliar to our eyes and ears, and old instruments given new life by being played again.
3 May 2024